The 4 Greatest Things in Life (Everyone Manages to Ruin)

I know one of you, and it's just one, eats bacon-wrapped bacon every day, has sex with supermodels, and gets paid to play video games, and this article means nothing to you aside from my hilarious jokes, and that's OK. You don't even need to comment at the bottom, I believe you already. But the rest of us. Oh man, the rest of us have made some terrible decisions. And they weren't wrong decisions; they were just miserable ones. We did them on purpose because we thought they'd be good, like how sometimes you think, "Maybe if I clench, this fart will come out super quiet and no one will know," but instead you create a nefarious ass piccolo that lilts and rolls like a jaunty Irish jig and now not only does everyone know, they think your intestines are all fucked up and musical. It's a hand we're all dealt sometimes.

#4. Health

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Almost everyone wants to be healthy. Some people legitimately don't give a shit, and God bless their greasy, heavy-breathing hides for having the willpower to not give a damn if they live or are desirable or can get up the stairs without blacking out and screaming during their unconscious night terrors on step eight. The rest of us do want to be healthy to a greater or lesser degree, whether that means you're the guy who runs 2 miles every morning before work or you just really debate whether or not to order a side salad instead of fries and end up just choosing fries anyway. It's the want that we're concerned with, because that's where misery is born.

If you're already a fitness model, you probably don't remember the misery, but if not, you know how much you hate wondering if gluten is bad for you. Who the fuck even came up with that? Gluten? That we live in a world in which people have to wonder if gluten is bad for them is sicker than paying someone to pee on you, because at least that's between two consenting adults and can be easily cleaned up. The gluten thing is a clusterfuck that no one asked for. Unfortunately, we're all aware of it now, and it's always in the back of your head when you're on the bus eating a loaf of bread, thinking, "Hey, am I ruining my insides? Why is everyone staring at me? Did I forget pants again?"

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I once ate a boot filled with ham.

Every day you see ads for new diets, products proclaiming health benefits derived from shit like acai berry, probiotics, and super steak, and helpful tips for not being an outrageous, cholesterol-and-saturated-pudding-laden fatty. I think I made up super steak, but it sounds like it'd be awesome if it were real. You choose to either ignore these or look into them, but regardless of the choice you make, there's a good chance, even if only for a moment, that you wonder whether you need to make a change. And then later you choose that salad instead of the fries. You choose the stairs instead of the elevator.

Now before I lose you, I'm not saying those are bad choices. Those are good. It's good to want to be healthy, it's good not to butt chug butter at parties and use a scooter to go from the buffet to the toilet to the buffet again. But the reason so many diets fail and so much money is paid out for all these new fitness programs and jerk-off replicator Shake Weights and juicers and shit is because most people want the benefits but not the effort. Write that down: I'm the first person to ever think of it. But the noteworthy part is that you make yourself miserable trying to make yourself happy and eventually misery wins out, so you stop and gorge yourself on microwave burritos and unhappy masturbation because it's way easier than gluten-free rice crisps and a stair climber. And, in a depressing way, happier. And you'll do it over and over.

#3. Work

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Nothing is more sad in the life of a human than the life of a human. You have a few good years of childhood when you can eat candy all the time, watch cartoons, and actually get to discover masturbation for the first time before the crushing reality of what "life" really is sets in. We live in a world that demands, for the most part, that we toil until we physically cannot do it anymore. And while as a child we're told we can be anything we want, it's obviously a lie, because who the fuck wants to work at Arby's? Not who needs to, because everyone at Arby's needs to work there, as sure as Kardashians need cameras pointed at them to prevent them from withering into shriveled husks full of forgotten, mediocre porno and meringue, but did any of those little beef jockeys wake up when they were 9 from a beautiful dream of mixing Arby-Q sauce? God no. Most of us never do what we want, or we do it fleetingly, or in our spare time after work. But work is what you have to do. Because you need money for food, for shelter, for ladies of the night who charge extra just to make you some pancakes, like that's fair.

There are varying degrees of satisfaction in the workplace, and likely a lot of people are "mostly" happy with what they do, but a lot of that almost satisfaction is born from resignation. Like how you decide what courses you should take in college based on the demand that will exist in the real world for people with those skills. You mold your life to fit a world that tells you there's a demand for male preschool teachers, even though children are less appealing to you than actual mold.

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"I cry myself to sleep at night. Now spit."

Dental hygienists are probably the best example of the despair of modern employment. They needed to do something, they weighed their options, and the best they could come up with was dental hygienist. I don't mean this as an insult; I mean that, when you weigh things like salary, challenge, and skill, and potential for employment, a dental hygienist is a really good choice. You're not slinging burgers, you make a livable wage, and you provide a necessary service. I will never, ever believe there's a single dental hygienist on Earth who wanted to be one, who pursued it for love and interest rather than necessity. No one wants to be the person who drains spit and blood from the mouth of an incapacitated and narcotic-addled stranger.

Work tends to work out like an arranged marriage, where you end up together because shit happens, and maybe in the long run it'll work out, or maybe not, but something had to happen, and running off to live in a cave wasn't an option.